Me to all of the haters and losers (of which there are many!) when they find out that sticks and stones can’t break my bones:
Look, it’s no secret that being a redhead as a adolescent isn’t all peaches and cream. As we went over on a blog a few days ago, ‘fire crotch,’ ‘ginger,’ ‘carrot top,’ ‘does the carpet match the drapes,’ are all colloquialisms we hear on a daily basis. Which, given the DEEP history of redheads isn’t actually all that bad. I’ll take being called ‘carrot pubes’ over being burned at the stake circa the Spanish Inquisition, that’s for sure.
But I’ve got good news for my fellow gingers! While we may have suffered some emotional/psychological scarring, as it turns out, having red hair predisposes us to being able to feel less PHYSICAL pain. The New York Post released an article last week that goes into detail about ‘melanocytes’ and other words I’ve never heard of to describe why it is that redheads feel less pain. I’ll be honest, despite a fervent viewing of Bill Nye the Science Guy in my youth, much of the article was lost on me. If you want to read it in full, click here. But to summarize: Redheads are impervious to pain according to science. And it’s NOT because we don’t have souls.
PS: It might be because we don’t have souls.
Double PS: I would like to present one counterpoint to this article: Sunburn. When the PGA Championship first came to Whistling Straits in 2004, my buddy and I had practice round passes that Tuesday. Basically we got to walk the course and watch practice rounds from sunup to sundown. Even though I was a fairly seasoned ginger by this point in my life (20 years old), for some reason, I didn’t put sunscreen on that day. We spend 8 hours on a clear blue sky day walking the course. As we were heading to the parking lot at the end of the afternoon, I turned to my buddy, Nick, and asked ‘how bad is my sunburn?’ I will never forget the look on his face, nor do I have the vocabulary to describe the look on his face. I spent the next 7 days in an Aloe Vera body cast, and let me tell you, I felt every ounce of that pain.
